› added 9 years ago

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TIL that Cleopatra was born of a LOT of incest: there were 3 brother-sister marriages and 3 uncle-niece marriages within 4 (patrilineal) generations, such that her family tree collapses to a single couple.

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dD4gZ TIL while filming “The Other Side Of The Wind” in 1970, director Orson Welles was unable to afford to pay his cinematographer Gary Graver for his work. Instead, Welles gave Graver his Oscar statuette that he had won for Best Original Screenplay for “Citizen Kane” in 1941.
x6JY5 TIL that nearly 100 years ago researchers at Princeton University successfully turned a living cat into a functioning telephone. Using a series of electrodes, they captured the electrical signals from the cat's auditory nerves and converted them into sound waves.
GBn5 TIL The Library of Congress is archiving every public tweet ever posted
R791l TIL the Judge Dredd series, running since 1977 without retcons, proceeds in real-time; as a year passes, one does in the comic. It is hailed as one of the best satires of American culture with a trend to predict things like mass surveillance, the rise of populism, and aspects of pandemic response.
PY8mZ TIL of Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA plan to overthrow Iran's democratically elected government, which included CIA agents bombing the house of a prominent Muslim while posed as pro-government supporters. The overthrow plan was successful, with 200-300 people killed